Politics
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The speech that Rupert had written for Gough. 30 November 1972
The following is the speech that Rupert Murdoch had written for Gough Whitlam’s final election rally in St Kilda in the 1972 election campaign. It was written by Evan Williams.who at the time was a senior journalist on The Australian. Gough Whitlam decided not to use ‘Rupert’s speech’ . What a journey it has been Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Who and for what are we fighting in Iraq.
Australia has sent troops to fight in Iraq Wars I, II and III. Our participation has been disastrous in each. The latest news tells us that in the battle to oust IS from Tikrit the victory belonged to the Shiite militia controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp. So our ‘allies’ in Iraq against IS Continue reading »
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Ian Webster. Alcohol-drenched cricket.
Michael Thorn is right; the ICC Cricket World Cup was an alcohol-drenched event (SMH Tuesday, 31st March 2015). Cricketers were once models of sportsmanship. There was even altruism and some became statesmen. Recall, “That’s simply not cricket.” No longer, as the game is subverted by money and alcohol. As I write, the ABC is broadcasting Continue reading »
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David Zyngier. Australia should follow Chile’s lead and stop funding private schools.
Australia is one of the very few countries in the OECD that publicly funds private schools. More than 40% of Australian secondary children now attend private schools – either so-called independent or religious schools. Australia has one of the most privatised school systems in the OECD. Prior to 1972 no private schools received any government Continue reading »
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John Menadue We still need to address the defects in our constitutional arrangements that November 11 1975 revealed.
We have rightly been remembering the achievements of Malcolm Fraser on human rights and race. But we should not forget the enormous damage that the events of November 11, 1975, did to Australian public life and trust in our institutions. Conservatives keep highlighting the shortcomings of the Whitlam governments in order to hide their complicity Continue reading »
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Rodney Tiffin. The university rankings no government wants to talk about.
At a conference of university leaders in early 2013, Tony Abbott promised “relative policy stability” in higher education if he became prime minister. A year later, Universities Australia began its first Abbott-era budget submission by welcoming “the undertaking of the government to preserve funding arrangements for higher education, including the commitment not to make further cuts to Continue reading »
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Race Mathews ‘Let Us Now Begin’
The philosopher George Santayana wrote famously ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. A case in point is failure by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) to remain mindful of the circumstances and shortcomings that denied it office from the middle -1950s federally until 1972 and until 1982 in Victoria. When I Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Improving health outside the health portfolio
Ministers for Health in Australia are seen very largely as ministers in charge of health services rather than health. The fact is that some major issues causing poor health or which could be the means to improve health are outside the normal health portfolio. Major health problems are caused by junk food, alcohol and tobacco. Continue reading »
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Andrew Wilson. More hospitals, more hospitals, more hospitals.
As Andrew Wilson points out, all major parties are obsessed with hospitals as the answer to our health problems. The three major shortcomings in health in Australia are mental health, indigenous health and rural health. These problems are best addressed outside hospitals. But ministers, the media and the community seldom think beyond hospitals. For ministers Continue reading »
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Andrea Carson. Heed Fraser’s warning on Australian media concentration – it’s getting worse.
The passing of former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser last Friday prompted me to recall his warning about the state of Australian media ownership in an interview I did with him during the last federal election. He said: “In my term, there were seven print proprietors. Now there is one and a bit. We have the Continue reading »
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Walter Hamilton. Lee Kuan Yew and Australia
Lee Kuan Yew ran the island-state of Singapore, someone said, with a mixture of charisma and fear. Having worked there as a correspondent for the ABC in the mid-1980s, the remark seems apposite to me. Lee’s brilliance as a politician and statesman is undisputed, but the country he forged, improbably, out of a remnant of Continue reading »
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John Menadue. More problems with the Department of Health and Ageing.
On 16 March, I drew attention to a Capability Review of the Department of Health and Ageing by the Australian Public Service Commission. It set out a very worrying analysis of the overall performance of DHA. We now have a report by the Australian National Audit Office of DHA’s administration of the Fifth Community Pharmacy Continue reading »
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Defence and Security, Human Rights, Immigration, refugees, Indigenous affairs, Politics, Tributes, World Affairs
Tributes to Malcolm Fraser.
See below, tributes from Fred Chaney and Robert Manne on Malcolm Fraser’s achievements in public life. John Mendue. Fred Chaney in The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/malcolm-fraser-a-leader-who-believed-there-is-a-moral-compass-in-our-nations-life Robert Manne in The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/frasers-great-conservative-achievement-cementing-whitlams-progress-on-race Continue reading »
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Ian Macphee. Personal memories of Malcolm Fraser.
I first met Malcolm in 1973 when he was shadow minister for Industrial Relations in the Coalition opposition. I was Director of the Victorian Chamber of Manufactures and intensely involved in industrial relations. Malcolm had just been given that responsibility and wished to explore issues seriously. We did so for over two hours. I told Continue reading »
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Laurie Patton. The ‘metadata’ Bill.
The House of Representatives has passed, with amendments, the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014. The Bill requires telcos and Internet Service Providers to store certain information (called “metadata”) for a period of two years. Metadata is essentially the information that reveals the parties to phone and email communications and other things Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Cars are killing our cities.
At almost every election, we are being wooed with stories of more freeways to accommodated more and more cars. It is self-defeating. In our public infrastructure we waste more money on roads than on anything else. As I have argued in my re-post below, there are a whole range of policy issues that we must Continue reading »
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Joseph Stiglitz on the Trans Pacific Partnership.
At a community meeting in New York Joseph Stiglitz drew attention to the risks of TPP. He referred to the secrecy about the whole proposal. He said that TPP ‘is much worse than a blank cheque about trade’. He added that TPP ‘would not only become the law of the land, but every other law Continue reading »
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John Quiggin. The Trans-Pacific partnership: it might be about trade, but it’s far from free.
There can be few topics as eye-glazingly dull as international trade agreements. Endless hours of negotiation on such arcane topics as rules of origin and most favoured nation status combine with an alphabet soup of acronyms to produce a barely readable text hundreds of pages long. But unless you were actually involved in exporting or Continue reading »
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Kerry Goulston. Two health reform issues.
Instead of tinkering around the edges of Health Reform in Australia,and dodging meaningful revision of the Medical Benefits and Pharmaceutical Benefits Schemes, all Federal politicians and leading clinicians could be debating two issues which would have significant effects over the next 20 years. Currently thousands of clinicians (doctors, nurses, allied health and other healthcare providers) Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Private health insurance and funding a Medicare Dental Scheme.
In this blog I have written extensively about the damage that private health insurance (PHI) is doing in Australia. We are sleep-walking into a US style health disaster. If people want private health insurance, that is their right, but I see no reason why the taxpayer should subsidise a socially divisive and nationally damaging subsidy. Continue reading »
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John Menadue. A capability review of the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing (DHA)
In this blog I have raised many times my concerns about the major shortcomings of DHA and the barrier it presents to improved health policy and programs… We saw it most recently over the GP co-payment. I argue that the ministerial/departmental model in health has failed and needs review… Since 2011 the Australian Public Service Continue reading »
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John Tulloh. Israel the promised land of democracy.
Surrounded by a hostile region where even basic freedoms cannot be taken for granted, Israel is to be admired for its electoral democracy at least. It has a boisterous political system full of wheeling and dealing with everybody having a say. One party even has a 101-year-old leader. Electioneering is in full swing right now Continue reading »
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Spencer Zifcak. The Martin Place Siege
I first came across Man Haron Monis, the Sydney siege gunman, in early 2013. The High Court of Australia had just handed down an important new decision on the breadth of the protection the Australian Constitution provides for freedom of expression. The facts of the case centred upon offensive letters sent to the parents of Continue reading »
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Julia Davison. It takes a nation to raise a child.
The week after Australia Day each year, around 260,000 five-year old Australians start school. Of those, almost 60,000 children – 23 per cent – will start school developmentally vulnerable in some way. Children who start school behind often stay behind, and are likely to finish school with skills and competencies that have not equipped them Continue reading »
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Spencer Zifcak. Proportionality Lost: Australia’s New Counter-Terrorism Laws. Part 2
The Foreign Fighters Bill The second tranche of counter-terrorism legislation introduced by the Attorney-General, Senator Brandis, late last year was contained in the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Foreign Fighters) Bill. This Bill (now passed into law) amended several Commonwealth Acts, most notably the Commonwealth Criminal Code. The primary purpose of these new laws is to enable Continue reading »
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Spencer Zifcak. Proportionality Lost in Australia’s new Counter-Terrorism Laws. Part 1
The Attorney-General, George Brandis, crashed two major tranches of counter-terrorism law through federal parliament recently. As always there are two problems with such an approach: overkill and error. Both tranches demonstrate these deficits in abundance. It’s important to say that in Australia the threat of terrorist attacks is real. So is the danger posed by Continue reading »
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Alex Wodak. Reducing the demand for illicit drugs
At his Congressional confirmation hearing in January 2001, the then Secretary of Defense-designate Donald Rumsfeld was asked whether US drug problems were best attacked by reducing demand or targeting drug supplies. Rumsfeld said that he believed that illicit drug use was “overwhelmingly a demand problem”. He added, “If demand persists, it’s going to find ways Continue reading »
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Helen Sykes and David Yencken. Leadership in the public interest.
No fundamental social change occurs merely because government acts. It’s because civil society, the conscience of a country, begins to rise up – demand – demand – demand change. (Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States) History shows that the public interest can vary over time and between societies. These are, nonetheless, ideals Continue reading »
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Michael Keating. The 2015 Intergenerational Report
Purpose of the Intergenerational Report The Intergenerational Report (IGR) should be an important document. It purports to tell us what the Australian population, economy and Budget could look like in forty years time. Of course no-one really knows what the economy will look like in forty years time. Instead the IGR tells us how fast Continue reading »
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Alex Wodak. The current imbalance between public and private interests.
The public interest, meaning ‘the welfare or wellbeing of the general public’, has always competed with private interests. Furthermore, public and private interests will always be in competition. What is so unusual about the current tension is the extreme imbalance: these days, private interests almost always get what they want. The policy domination by huge companies Continue reading »
